Sìtǎ jì 寺塔記
Records of Monasteries and Pagodas (in Cháng’ān)
written by 段成式 (Duàn Chéngshì, 803–863, 撰)
About the work
A 1-juan late-Tang Cháng’ān monastic-gazetteer compiled by the great late-Tang zhìguài author Duàn Chéngshì 段成式 (字 Kēgǔ 柯古, 803–863), best known as the author of the Yǒuyáng zázǔ 酉陽雜俎 — a sprawling repository of Tang anecdote, ethnography, and the supernatural. The Sìtǎ jì records the author’s visits to Cháng’ān monasteries during his tenure as a junior official in the imperial library and ancestral-temple offices in Wǔzōng Huìchāng 武宗會昌 3 (癸亥 = 843), continuing through the early Xuānzōng 宣宗 era. The dating bracket is 843 – 853.
The text is transmitted in Taishō 51 as T2093.
Abstract
Duàn’s preface explains the project: in the summer of Wǔzōng’s third year, he and his colleagues Zhāng Xīfù 張希復 and Zhèng Fú 鄭符 had a leisure-day and visited Dàxìngshànsì 大興善寺. Comparing what they saw with the Liǎngjīng xīnjì 兩京新記 and the Yóumù jì 遊目記 (older Cháng’ān gazetteers), they found these older works deficient and incomplete — and resolved to make their own record.
The work is therefore a first-person Cháng’ān monastery gazetteer of the immediately pre-Wǔ-zōng-persecution period (the great anti-Buddhist persecution of Huìchāng 5 = 845). The text records: each principal Cháng’ān monastery’s location and dimensions; its inscriptions (碑文 bēiwén) and dedicatory tablets — Duàn was a senior literary scholar and his transcriptions of Tang epigraphical materials are themselves valuable textual witnesses; its wall-paintings (壁畫 bìhuà) by named Tang artists (the work preserves attributions to Wú Dàozǐ 吳道子, Yán Lìběn 閻立本, and other masters of the Tang painting tradition); its planted trees (often associated with named planters: e.g., the persimmon and white peony in the Cí’ēnsì were planted by the monk Fǎlì shàngrén 法力上人); and its anecdotal-historical tradition.
The work concludes with extended notice of the Cí’ēnsì 慈恩寺 — the great Xuánzàng-associated monastery in Cháng’ān (over 1,890 jiān of buildings, with 300 imperially-ordained monks at its founding) — and notes the imperial reception of Xuánzàng’s manuscripts on his return from India (Tàizōng commissioned a 9-section musical performance and the Chángshūzōng 太常卿 Jiāngxiàwáng Dàozōng 江夏王道宗 personally received the manuscripts).
The work is the principal late-Tang Cháng’ān monastic gazetteer outside the canonical Liǎngjīng texts and is one of the few sources to preserve the immediate pre-Huì-chāng-persecution state of the great Cháng’ān monasteries.
Translations and research
- E. H. Schafer, The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) — uses Duàn’s broader corpus extensively.
- 周紹良, 段成式研究 and related Chinese-language scholarship on Duàn.
- The work is also treated in standard surveys of Tang Cháng’ān (Xiong Cunrui, Sui-Tang Chang’an; Charles Holcombe; Mark Edward Lewis).
Other points of interest
The work was compiled in the very last years before the Huìchāng persecution of 845 that demolished much of the Tang Buddhist establishment — making it the principal first-hand documentary witness to the great Tang Cháng’ān monasteries at their late-Tang peak. Many of the monasteries Duàn describes were destroyed or substantially diminished by the persecution and never returned to their pre-845 splendour.